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Feed2JS Changes / Roadmap

Next week brings a lot of changes for Feed2JS— just posted to our Updates are a number of things that affect users of our site:

The first week of April 2006 brings a number of changes in Feed2JS, all to make it bigger and better. First of all, anyone using the primary “jade” server at Maricopa, this server will be going offline for a few hours starrting 8:00am Tuesday, April 4 (MST), as the server will be moving from my office up to the main server room in our bulding. In the long run, this will increase the speed and uptime of our server.

Also, due are some new code changes in the Feed2Js script. The first is to fix an issue in the generated content for the way CSS classes are declared (my mistake, we use invalid “_” characters). When this change happens, it only affects your site if you are using your own style sheets to control the display of the feeds. You will have to edit your CSS style sheets to replace all “_” with “-“. I am sorry but after lots of experiments could not find anyway to preserve things for exisiting sites.

For the near future, I am hoping to move the primary site and location of the download to an open source site- a place holder has been set up. In addition, the set up of new mirror sites will/should be more self service than it is now.

Also on the roadmap to be added is support for RSS enclosures to handle podcast content. This requires some modifications of the MagpieRSS code which still lacks this as a built-in support.

Finally, I should let it be known that as of April 7, I am leaving my position with the Maricopa system fot a new role with the New Media Constortium. This “jade” server will not disappear in the near future and hopefully in the long term, and I will still have involvement in the Feed2JS code (it is my baby after all), but am hopeful with the code in an open source site, that others can contribute to its devlopment and evolution.

What this means is that the server may be out for an hour or several hours one day next week. I hate doing this as it can hang your pages if you depend on our site. If this is something you want to avoid, you should change your embedded JavaScript to use one of our current mirror sites. These can hopefully be updated right after a main site is done.

I really wish I had more time to spiff up Feed2JS- it is currently feeding content from about 10,000 sites a day from our server alone, and its traffic is about 96% of the load on the web server.

An early 90s builder of the web and blogging Alan Levine barks at CogDogBlog.com on web storytelling (#ds106 #4life), photography, bending WordPress, and serendipity in the infinite internet river. He thinks it's weird to write about himself in the third person.

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